Festivals like Gokulashtami, Ganeshotsav, Navratri and Mohurram are an integral part of Bombay’s social calendar. They have been and continue to be intricately connected with the city’s politics. Jim Masselos’ book, The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power takes us into a foray of Bombay’s urban neighbourhoods in an effort to understand the history of this complex city. It is a collection of essays previously published by the author in various journals and edited books. The essays cover a span that begins in the 1860s and ends in the early years of 2000. In this period Bombay metamorphosed from a colonial city into a metropolis nurturing ambitions of becoming a global hub in the new millennium. The main advantage of putting together these collected essays is that they are easily accessible to researchers, students and anybody interested in Bombay’s history.
Since they cover a long time frame, they allow historians to study the transformations that have occurred in the city and its social fabric. It will not be an exaggeration to say that taken together the essays represent the historian Jim Masselos’s lifetime work. Since they were not published as a collection earlier, they remained sidelined and conspicuously absent on the bookshelf of monographs on Bombay city with the exception of his first book on urban politics in nineteenth century western India. Masselos completed his doctorate at the University of Bombay in 1964 and has continued to work on Bombay’s history ever since.